The colonization of the Moon

A $100 billion program cannot be justified with pictures of craters. The real goal of this and subsequent missions is to beat Chinese taikonauts to the punch, arriving first on the Moon to win the new Cold War against Beijing.

After a ten-day journey to the Moon, the Artemis II space mission ended in triumph. The contrast between the images beamed back by the astronauts and the current news footage depicting conflicts on our planet could not have been starker.

However, the mission's success and the awe it inspired do not erase the context in which it took place or its ultimate significance, which goes far beyond the mission's scientific contribution. Certainly, NASA reasserted its immense engineering prowess in a space endeavor that went off without a hitch, both at launch and during Saturday night's daring reentry. From the guidance systems to the toilet, the spacecraft proved efficient and capable of accommodating four humans for ten days in just nine cubic meters of space.

The spacecraft's heat shield also did its job in the final minutes of the mission, protecting the astronauts from the fireball that engulfed the Orion capsule as it plunged into the atmosphere at nearly 40,000 kilometers per hour. Thanks to the flawless technical performance of the craft, the astronauts were able to conduct a detailed, firsthand observation of the far side of the Moon and demonstrate that robotics cannot yet fully replace human beings.

But the contribution of new knowledge is a minor detail compared to the financial investment poured into the Artemis program, estimated at around $100 billion so far. Such a mountain of cash cannot be justified by simply monitoring craters: the real goal of this and subsequent missions is to beat Chinese taikonauts to the punch, arriving first on the Moon to win the new Cold War against Beijing – an objective explicitly stated by the US administration. If possible, by 2028, just in time for the next US presidential election.

Unlike the first Cold War, the goal is not merely symbolic. Donald Trump, in collaboration with NASA's new director Jared Isaacman, has essentially transformed the mission into a colonization program similar to his currently thwarted plans for Greenland. Instead of placing a space station in orbit around the Moon as the original plan envisioned, the focus is now directly on building a base on the lunar surface. In the upcoming missions of the MAGA version of the Artemis program, astronauts will have to occupy the Moon with “boots on the ground” and appropriate its resources, from the rare earth elements essential for microchips to the helium useful for nuclear fusion, should that ever become a reality.

The White House executive order which includes these provisions is titled “Ensuring U.S. Supremacy in Space.” It doesn't get any clearer than that.

Thus, space exploration no longer represents an alternative to war, but its continuation by other means. Against the backdrop of the standoff over the Strait of Hormuz, there is competition with China and its challenge to Western technological sovereignty. And even on the Moon, Trump is showing that international law is not worth the paper it’s printed on: the international Outer Space Treaty signed way back in 1967 prohibits turning it into a mine for private use.

Italy and Europe are not neutral spectators in this race. Private companies and state-controlled entities supplied several crucial components for the Artemis mission, and they have been boasting about it in recent days. The usual suspect, Italian aerospace giant Leonardo, described its own role as being “on the front lines” – just in case it was not clear that this is a war. The European Space Agency built the module that provided oxygen, propulsion and climate control for the Orion capsule in partnership with Airbus, 13 governments and over 100 subcontractors across the continent. European astronauts are candidates to get to walk on the lunar surface, and Italy's own Luca Parmitano and Samantha Cristoforetti are in pole position for the selection.

But is taking part in a mission that is pursuing increasingly less scientific objectives really something to boast about? The change of course imposed so explicitly by the Trump administration makes it legitimate today to re-examine our collaboration on the Artemis missions and make it contingent on the peaceful, cooperative and supranational nature of future space exploration projects. As the scientific journal Nature wrote in a fine op-ed, “The Moon belongs to all of us – not just countries that can afford to reach it.” Italy and Europe have the opportunity to ensure that international law is respected, at least in space, seeing as they haven’t even tried to do so on Earth.

© Il Manifesto Global